Mon 25 April 2016

I am sick in the bed, so I have spent a day or so listening to
the Dan Carlin’s excellent podcast series “Death Throes of
the Republic”. It is an excellent story. (Original draft of
this post has been lying in my Drafts folder for couple of years,
so I am now mostly re-purposing it for my current needs).

Dan persuasively describes overwhelming need for success built in
every Roman man all the way from his childhood by following his
ancestors as the examples of success. He described how every good
noble Roman family had special rooms filled with the busts and
pictures of their famous ancestors, how the similar memorabilia
filled also rest of their homes. He claims that this made
political success and political power the most important measure
of success and personal value. I don’t want to argue whether
this theory is right or not (which of course, I have no chance of
doing anyway). I was surprised however by two immediate notions:
the first was very personal and the second on the other hand very
non-personal and theoretical. I will leave the personal thought
to some other post, but let me write a bit about the latter one.

If we consider this thirst for the political power the main drive
of elite (at least) in the Ancient (and to some extent Medieval)
times, it seems to me that one of the greatest inventions of the
Enlightenment was replacing power with wealth as the main
motivator. The question which intrigues me right now is whether
this preference for wealth (where power is mostly a mean of
acquiring the wealth, not the other way around as I believe was
the dominant order in previous centuries) is also not something
which is peculiarly Modern phenomenon. If it so, then it is
feasible that it will also vanish with the end of modernity. I
wonder whether we will return to the bad old days of the naked
power grabs, civil wars and stuff like that.

Actually currently I am in the process of going through the
podcast “The History of Rome” and I am now in the
depressive post-Antonine years of the real unraveling of the
Roman Empire in the early third century, so my opinions are
probably excessively pessimistic, but Mr. Putin’s current
efforts (propagated by his willing puppets in the Central Europe)
seems like coming from this style of thinking. But perhaps, for
Russia it is not postmodernism but rather rejection of the
enforced modernism which they never really accepted fully and
return to the mythical premodern times of the primitive Russia.
Sad times.

There is another story which makes me wonder in the Dan’s
podcast. Why there was such inability to deal with the issues
which had to be obvious for hundred of years, which were clearly
threatening the very existence of the Roman Republic and yet
nobody was able to deal with them well. One obvious one is the
issue of the Roman citizenship. Why Senate have not managed to
deal with the issue Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus tried to deal
with for all those years (more than century)? I still hope that
the persistent issues of our times which we keep kicking down the
road (e.g., democratic deficit of EU, Euro area overreach, etc.)
will be eventually resolved somehow. But what if not? What if the
periodic unraveling of the southern EU will be persistent part
of our life, leading in the end to the death throes of EU?